Broadly known, Indonesia has vast agricultural potential. Among others, many industrial crops such as palm oil, cocoa, cassava, rubber and coconut are cultivated in the country. These crops are grown almost everywhere in Indonesia and the processing industry entails a huge potential to utilise the accruing biomass waste. Against this backdrop and the increasing oil prices paired with the steady rise of electricity demand, the utilisation of agro-industrial waste becomes more and more important.

To this regard, LCORE-INDO project aims at the utilisation of biomass waste from large industrial palm oil and rice facilities in the range of 1-10 MW energy generation capacity. The agro-industry can add value to their surplus biomass, if they could feed electricity into the grid un-bureaucratically and at cost-covering prices. Appropriate feed-in tariffs and transparent implementation mechanism is therefore the key to unlocking this energy resource. In addition to the agro-businesses, there are large quantities of solid waste that is burned inefficiently. Additionally heavily contaminated waste water due to existing treatment methods contributes significantly to methane emissions. The power generation potential in the palm oil industry alone is estimated to be 5,000 MW. The mitigation potential of a systematic treatment of waste water through biogas plants exceeds an equivalent of 10 million tonnes of CO2 annually.